From the archives: Canada's capital — almost; Montreal was briefly the capital in the 1840s, but Queen Victoria thought Ottawa was saferBack to video

Gazette, Friday, Jan. 22, 1858

Could it be true? Was Queen Victoria about to declare Montreal the permanent capital of Canada?

Certainly the Gazette thought so. “The … rumour wears an air of greater probability and authenticity than others that have been stated,” we wrote.

Alas, it was not to be. “In the judgment of Her Majesty,” Colonial Secretary Henry Labouchere wrote on the last day of 1857, “the City of Ottawa combines more advantages than any other place in Canada … and is selected by Her Majesty accordingly.”

It took nearly four weeks for the news to reach Canada, and once it did The Gazette put on a brave face. “After the claims of Montreal we have believed those of Ottawa came next, and this has been generally admitted by Montrealers,” we said on Jan. 27. “It will not probably give them very intense satisfaction to know that the second best place has been chosen at the expense of the best, though it may earlier reconcile them to their own loss.”

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Montreal certainly had a strong case. It was the largest city in Canada, where manufacturing, banking and other commercial ventures were concentrated as nowhere else. It was the bailiwick of arguably the most powerful politician in the land, George-Étienne Cartier. It was the fulcrum on which the colony’s transportation network hinged, the link between deep-sea and inland shipping, the hub of rail lines stretching west to Windsor, east to Rivière du Loup and south to tidewater at Portland, Me.

It had even been Canada’s capital once before, from 1844 to 1849, but therein lay the rub.

Canada then consisted of the southern bits of the future Quebec and Ontario, created from a union of Lower and Upper Canada in 1840. Kingston was the first capital but proved too isolated. Most politicians, including many from Canada West, welcomed the move to Montreal four years later.

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It all came unstuck in the spring of 1849. The legislature, which then sat in the St. Ann Market building in Youville Square, was debating the contentious Rebellion Losses Bill. When Governor-General Lord Elgin arrived to sign it into law, he was attacked by a howling, egg-throwing mob. That night, the mob burned the building to the ground.

This was no place for a seat of government. Later that year, it was moved to Toronto, then to Quebec City in 1855 and finally back to Toronto.

Perhaps Montreal thought the passage of nearly a decade had been enough to erase the shame. But there were other disadvantages. Like the other main contenders, Toronto and even Quebec City, it lay too close to those aggressive Americans. All three cities at one time or another had been attacked by U.S. forces. Ottawa, on the other hand, was far enough away that, as Stephen Leacock once quipped, new invaders “would never find it.”

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Despite the queen’s decree, however, it was not a done deal. Partisans of the other cities fought on, not only hoping to snatch the prize at the last moment but also as a means of bringing down the government of Cartier and his partner in Canada West, John A. Macdonald. It took until Feb. 2, 1859, for the House of Assembly to ratify the choice of Ottawa.

Five years later, the matter arose once more. Confederation, aimed at uniting the Province of Canada with Britain’s other colonies in North America, was fast approaching. The Quebec Conference, which did much to shape the eventual British North America Act, confirmed Ottawa would be the federal capital. It was just as well: More than $2 million had already been borrowed to start constructing parliament buildings there.

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Yet even then the issue might not have been settled. Years afterward, the prominent Ottawa architect Colborne Meredith recalled how, even after confederation in 1867, the city’s suitability was still doubted.

“After-dinner talk at Rideau Hall in Lord Monck’s regime was frequently on this topic,” Meredith reminisced, “and it was felt that it would be impossible for the government to remain here.”

Viscount Monck was the first post-confederation governor-general, and Meredith was well placed to comment. His father, Edmund, as under-secretary of state in the new dominion, was very much the political insider. Those nearly new and very expensive parliament buildings, Colborne Meredith said, would simply “be sold to a religious order.”

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